A Princess of Mars

A Princess of Mars is a science fantasy novel by the American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs and the first of his Barsoom series. It was serialised in All-Story Magazine between February and July 1912 and published as a book afterwards, and it is usually named as a classic example of early twentieth-century pulp fiction.

The narrator is John Carter, a Virginian who cannot remember being young and who finds himself on Mars after a strange experience in the Arizona desert. He arrives among the green Martians, enormous and warlike, and is taken prisoner; the planet's weaker gravity makes him strong enough to earn a place among them and to meet Dejah Thoris, the princess of the title.

Burroughs wrote the book as a serial adventure, and his Mars is a dying world of canals, ruined cities and warring peoples. The novel was followed by many sequels, and it became one of the founding texts of the planetary romance and a continuing influence on the genre that came after it. Its Mars is an adventure setting rather than a forecast, and the sequels were written for readers who wanted more of it.